Ever wondered what Sam Ovens is cooking? We did some investigation, and it smells like a scam.

According to his website, Sam Ovens is an entrepreneur from New Zealand who dropped out of university and started two successful companies by the age of 24. He now charges thousands of dollars for courses on how to become a millionaire consultant, just like him.

However, according to our experience of his webinar along with some online sleuthing, we think Sam Ovens is yet another joker and punk kid who is out to make a quick dollar at the expense of eager, inexperienced, and naive young entrepreneurs.

Just like the other sleazebags in the business advice industry, Sam Ovens talks a big game from his supposed Manhattan penthouse, but doesn’t provide a shred of evidence to prove that he’s actually done what he claims he can teach you.

Combined with typical ‘get rich quick’ sales tactics and a generally annoying Australian accent, we can safely group Sam Ovens’ scam attempts among some of the worst in the industry.

Today’s investigation includes:

Analysis of Sam Ovens’ advertising

Is Sam Ovens who he claims to be? NO!

Sam Ovens’ student success stories: BULLSHIT!

Review: Sam Ovens Webinar

Sam Ovens’ Advertising

Like a lot of other people in the industry, Sam Ovens’ advertising is geared towards selling people on the concept of a lifestyle. When he quit his job, he claims things weren’t going so well. Along with millions of other over-optimistic young people today, he claims to have started a couple of unsuccessful companies, and was living in his parent’s garage while trying to make ends meet.

But then, Sam Ovens claims to have “discovered consulting”, which unlocked an incredible revenue stream for him. And after a few short years, he went from living on a couch at his parent’s house to living in one of the nicest houses in the Southern Hemisphere (as featured on a magazine cover), owning a yacht, and so on…

I can’t emphasize how often tactics like this are used in the entrepreneurship advice and get-rich-quick industries. Selling people on the concept of a cool lifestyle and flashing pictures of the trappings of wealth (house, car, boat, women, travel) is a classic scam maneuver that usually precedes a bunch of bullshit claims.

In this way, Sam Ovens is no different. Here’s a few things he claims during his webinar, some of which are demonstrably false, and some that cannot be verified.

Is Sam Ovens who he claims to be? No!

Apparently, Sam Ovens makes $4.5 million per year helping business owners do… something. He never really elaborates on what it is, exactly, that he consults on, although in his webinar he does mention that his first client paid him $1000 to redo a website.

Based on the massive annual revenue he claims, you would think that Sam would have a list of happy clients for whom he drove business results (like pretty much every other consultant in the world), but… nope. Nothing. Not one case study on his website, not one happy consulting client testimonial (not student testimonial) on his LinkedIn profile.

The $4.5MM annual revenue he claims to generate through consulting is also a mathematical improbability… Sam Ovens suggests that a good monthly rate to charge your clients is $2000. If we assume that he charges a massive premium for his expertise, say, $5000/month, that’s 75 clients served on a monthly basis.

Ask any account executive at an advertising or consulting agency how many clients they service, and I guarantee you it’s not even remotely that high. Either Sam Ovens has built a massive consulting operation with legions of freelancers built up in such a way that’s totally invisible to anyone searching for it, or Sam Ovens is not making $4.5MM every year as a small business consultant.

Sam Ovens broke and living in his parents’ garage after two failed businesses: FALSE

During his webinar, Sam Ovens repeatedly drove home how nothing was going his way after he left his boring corporate desk job. But, as it turns out, Sam was also running a property management app called SnapInspect, which he successfully sold in 2013. This is hardly the rags-to-riches tale he spun in his webinar, when he claimed that nothing was going right for him.

Sam Ovens’ student success stories: BULLSHIT!

According to Sam, he’s the leading expert on creating wealth from consulting. Yet not only does his website and LinkedIn have no endorsements from consulting clients, they also lack glowing testimonials from students who have made bundles of money using Sam Ovens’ methods.

The “student examples” that Sam Ovens provides in his webinar are, with two exceptions, obviously scammers who are also selling get-rich-quick advice. The first exception is someone who seems real at first glance, but who lacks a digital presence outside of her business and whose success ($120,000 in 3 months) is not verifiable. The second exception is someone who doesn’t even have an online business presence, so I have no idea who the hell they are or what they do.

Dave Rogenmoser

Website, LinkedIn
This guy’s website SCREAMS “small-time hustler”. He sells advice on being an entrepreneur without verifiable proof that he knows what he’s talking about. You can get his guide, called “How I Built A $10,000/mo Cashflow Business in Under 100 Days”, at his website. Bulllllllshit.

Jake Englehorn

This guy is a fuckin’ ghost online. All I could find is a Twitter account. No website, no client testimonials. One navel-gazing article at Under30CEO.com, and a personal Facebook page that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the businesses he runs. Maybe he’s making a ton of money in Boise, Idaho, or maybe Sam Ovens is overstating how well his ‘students’ are doing.

Courtney Martin

LinkedIn, Website
At a glance, Courtney actually looks legitimate. She apparently specializes in helping cosmetic surgery practices grow their client base. Her LinkedIn has two recommendations from clinicians, both of whom cited her as helping them redesign their websites.

She also has a video testimonial and a website of her own, but her web presence is sparse otherwise, and I can’t find anything on Courtney outside of this stuff. It’s still a bit fishy, and I don’t think that Courtney Martin is making $1m+ a year, but I could accept as valid that she’s taken Sam’s course and is making a good go of things.

Paul Ryan

LinkedIn (I think), Website (now defunct)
This has to be a totally fake case study. In a Sam Ovens video testimonial, “Paul Ryan” (if that is even his real name) claims to be the founder of Marketslide, a super-successful consultancy. Only problem? It’s got 20 Twitter followers and no website.

On a related note, I can only find “Paul Xavier” on LinkedIn, who I’m assuming is the same person. He claims to “Help People Start Profitable Marketing Businesses & I’ve Created 11 6 Figure Marketers In Less Than 90 Days”. Faaaaaaake.

Joshua Harris

Another consultant consulting for wannabe consultants.

“For years I struggled selling online marketing services, web design, and a whole host of other online services, only to make a minimal living wage…After much trial and error, plus investing tens of thousands of dollars in high end training programs and masterminds, I created a formula to attract and deliver results for high ticket marketing clients with immense success. I now teach these strategies to people like you so you can do it too.”

Faaaaaaaaaake.

Review: Sam Ovens Webinar

“How to start your very own wildly profitable 6-figure consulting business and get your first high value client in just 42 days”

This webinar was awful. Sam started by giving a brief introduction to why consulting is the best way to become an entrepreneur, and then spent 15 minutes talking about himself and his personal story. How he quit his job and dropped out of college to be an entrepreneur;

“My first two businesses failed… I sold my cars, invested all my money, borrowed money from my grandparents… and was about $80,000 in debt… I worked like 12 hours a day for the first year, I fell flat on my face… Then out of sheer desperation to make something work, I turned to consulting. Through my failures, I learned a few things about what makes a good website. I was starting to look at local businesses, and they have awful websites…

Sam claims that at that point, his first sale was to a window tinting business for a $1000 website makeover. As mentioned above, this conveniently ignores the fact that he was growing SnapInspect at the same time. So that’s the first red flag.

And then, comes the ‘riches’ part of the ‘rags to riches’ narrative.

Glancing at the clock, I realized that at the twenty-minute mark of the webinar, Sam Ovens had yet to offer any actual advice on how to start or build a consulting business.

Thankfully, Sam did end up spending some time talking about the basics of building a consultancy business – choosing a niche, building a marketing stack (Facebook Ads, scheduling) and charge based on value-to-client, not on time-to-you. These are all basic business concepts which are also taught by many other people in this space.

Although Sam Ovens is technically ‘correct’, I don’t think anything he’s saying is novel or interesting. Yes, you need to find a niche, yes, you should charge on value, and yes, you need to put some thought into your marketing and outreach. Did he demonstrate enough expertise to make me think his online course is even remotely interesting? Absolutely not.

After sharing some common consulting knowledge, Sam then launched into a 30-minute sales pitch about his Consulting Accelerator course. An outline of the course is available via the below link, and I’ll mostly let you look at this for yourself:

If you want to pay $2000 to learn how to make a niche for yourself, learn basic sales skills, and set up Facebook Ads, be my guest. You could probably get the same education for $200 worth of books and Skillshare courses… or getting a real job for a while until you know what the hell you’re doing.

Other Concerns:

Why are some Australian/NZ accents unbearably annoying?

“Some people have said I could chaaaage up to tin grand for the things I sheer for free in this wibinar, and that’s troo!”

Inc.com and Fortune.com have some explaining to do:

It’s not like Inc.com and Fortune.com are known for accurate business journalism, but featuring this scam artist is disappointing, even by their standards.

How many desks does Sam Ovens have?

Seriously. In every fucking video he posts, he’s sitting at a different desk. What’s up with that?

Conclusion

Fuck Sam Ovens, fuck his fake case studies, fuck the little scammers he’s spawned, fuck this industry. If you are reading this and have been scammed for $2,000 by this squirrely bastard, email me so I can continue to build the case against him.

Forbes Asia just put this guy in their 30 under 30 valuing him.at $65 m USD quoting $100k per day revenue. This has to be complete fiction/ great PR from him. Rented jet/ rented apartment (in NZ too) / rented Rolls Royce/ rented yacht. Just seems unbelievable. I know guys in NZ who dealt with him a year ago before he moved to NYC and literally everything he said was a 95% fabrication with a sliver of truth. He claimed Citi was moving him to NYC to set up and run their own VC fund (okeeeey) and had seeded him $50mm. Yarrrrr.

ACTUAL DOLLARS:

This guy might have made $1Mm USD from fleecing idiots last year and he sold out of SnapInspect to his biz partner /50% shareholder for about $750k USD (SnapInsoect was a legit good small business- I don’t know why he didn’t stay with that , I guess scamming get rich quick idiots for $2k each is a whole bunch less work / easier). So he might have a couple of million bucks to his name and declining revenue from this consulting scam as more stories like this filter through FB etc.

Fuck this scam artist. Go build a real business that creates real value chump ( you had one with Snapinspect and then you threw it away cause you know, hard work and building a real biz brick by brick is boring…)

In the past 15 months, I have built a business that has generated over $600,000 thanks to what I learned from Sam’s trainings.

Not everyone will succeed from any given program that’s out there, but I can personally vouch that without the sales training, FB ads training, and program design training I learned from Sam, I would not have quadrupled my business revenue year over year from 2015 to 2016 (and I’m on pace to double what I did from 2016 in 2017).

Obviously I’m not going to dangle my actual details in front of people who like to slander others online without actually doing the obvious: pay for the training, implement it to the hilt, and only THEN pass judgment on whether it’s legit or a scam.

But I can speak from personal experience in saying that:

1) This article is incorrect: Sam has in fact built a multi-million dollar business. I know no one who works harder than Sam. He knows exactly what he wants. And he helps a ton of people get what they want, which enriches his bank account in the process. In fact, I suspect the numbers you see online actually understate what’s he’s made and how much he’s worth.

2) Tyler Durden is incorrect: Sam’s business does create real value. There are multiple parts of his training that on their own warrant the $2k price tag if you are an implementer. I have found this to be true repeatedly with Sam.

3) In the three desk photos included in this article as the grand finale, Sam is sitting on the same desk in the top and bottom photos. Obviously he can afford to buy a different desk for each day of the year if he wanted to, but it undermines your hit piece when you don’t notice something as obvious as that.

Ok Marla Singer/Sam – thanks for your own comment. But you know you are a con man dude. Come on… But then these stories have gotta be chopping down your lifestyle revenue. That’s the thing about idiots – there are only so many of them. My favourite one yet – consulting.com having a $100k per week turnover. You being worth $65mil lolol. That’s like me saying I value my cat at $1 billion dollars ergo I am a billionaire…

It blows my mind how people are so quick to think someone is a scam..I know him personally and his story is 100 percent true and I know how much time he spends mentoring every student and that majority see these incredible results he talks about. And yeah his course wont work for everyone because not everyone has the skills , determination or drive to be successful even with the likes of Sam Ovens help and that’s just life. The comments about the accents and desks ??Really grow up!!!!And make your own money instead of trying to do it by putting others down

So I bought this guys course for 2k just to see what the fuss was about. Not only did I want to see the course, I wanted to see his sales funnels.

Was it overpriced? Yeah, you can say so.. 100% of this info is on the internet. However if your time is valuable you can’t be arsed doing the research yourself.

Is he using aggressive sales tactics? Absolutely.. take this for example – right after signing up the guy asks you to either pay another 3k to upgrade to v2.0 or submit a video review. On the very first fucking day lol.

I have to say though the sales call transcript he had was worthwhile. Again.. you can probably find similar shit elsewhere but this really was the best bit about this course. You can probably find torrents for this course anyway, so if you do, be sure to check out this bit.

It blows my mind however when people get angry about guys like Sam. I mean I could understand you’d have a problem with someone literally murdering innocent people or animals for profit but the dude just sells overpriced infoproducts and has likely fabricated a backstory for his character. So what lol? Why so serious?

Why is the way that you make your money so much better or pure? If he can convince people to pay him money for his course, his knowledge, or his mentorship then that’s great. Thousands of universities have been doing this for centuries and plenty of them fail at producing successful students and could be called “scams” themselves.

Because your brother is preying on vulnerable people to finance his fake news lifestyle. The kindof half wits who sign up to pay $2k to your snake oil salesmen brother (or his mate Tai Lopez) etc – aren’t successful entrepreneurs who want to increase productivity / sales / revenue etc They are (mostly) young people looking for an easy ladder up who are too naive to really know the real truth of life(aside from winning lotto or marrying rich, there are no legit easy ladders). Also – everything about your brother is set up to hook young and vulnerable people like this. Most of them borrow the $ to pay the course etc.

NB: I could buy your brother maybe ten times over and you don’t see me paying for his services (which anyone can learn by umm starting their own business and watching stuff on youtube). So in short – shame on Sam ,shame on you for supporting this., shame on his f#4cking enablers in the friendly press (INC / Forbes Asia) etc. Go create something of value you big frauds. What’s next – you guys start a pay day loan company. Shame. Shame. Shame (where is the goddam Faith Militant when you need them….)

Sad that the caliber of this so called investigation is so low. It goes like this: “Sam claimed something. Well it must be bullshit because of course it’s bullshit!” That’s not an investigation, that’s conjecture. As a student in this course whose life was changed by it, I highly recommend you make an informed decision about it on more than just this article.

Thanks for this review. I was not going to pay Sam 5000.00$, but I’ve recently watched his introductory webinar. I’ve got some good advise from viewing that seminar with respect to general strategies, but I have a problem with people who fabricate and tell their stories in that way. What surprised me is that Sam doesn’t advise his clients to publish relevant content to get clients through the internet. Unfortunately writing valuable content is the best way to become a consultant and this requires great efforts and possibly a team of copywriters and SEO specialists. I’m not the type of consultant who would make FB campaigns based on nothing. I’m a patent and negotiator expert.